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Comment by altmind | Hacker News Reader

I remember that classic TDD (transport tycoon) was also turing-complete. You can make logical gates there using trains and railroad signals.

Minecraft is not only turing complete, there are multiple complete projects of calculators and microcontrollers done using red stone.

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Redstone is by design made for implementing logic, so it belongs to slightly different category. Although I think Redstones introduction was prompted by people building logic without it in the olden days.

I think Redstone's inspiration was people building computers in Dwarf Fortress with floodgates and pressure plates, rather than Minecraft specifically.

Dwarfputers are a wonderful tangent of their own, with a not-unlikely possibility of flooding your entire computer with firey death in the form of magma in some of the more impressive approaches - this has been possible (but quite difficult) for some time, more recent game versions have made non-fluid based logic gates[1] more realistic and usable.

Someone has built an (admittedly simple) space-invaders game[2] using df which is rather impressive.

1. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Computing#Disc...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2cMHwo3nAU

Back in the day I used to build single-shot logic using sand supported by torches holding back water. Water knocks out torches, sand falls releasing more water, etc. When redstone came along everything got much simpler :-)

I miss the days before command blocks when it was still just about getting clever with good old redstone and a couple gates. The piston update was massive. I've built some ridiculous contraptions such as color displays and tape reels and programmable mob traps and variable-clock-rate machinery. And how could I forget minecarts... And IndustrialCraft took all of this to the next level. Wow, I miss the golden days of Minecraft.

"Quad Core Computer with Redstones" features things like cache, hardware stack, a gpu connected to a 15x15 display, serial input and output port and many other interesting things. Also it's available as download by the creator.

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